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I have a friend from Carnegie Mellion University working for a Chinese upstart solar company

Whatever you have to say against China, their low wages mean they might be able to crack the cost/efficiency ratio if they make it cost really cheap.

And all sorts of good things happen when you do this... Anyone with any visionary blood in them knows what this means. Solar panels everywhere, energy on the cheap. Transportation doesn't cost gas money... Water and food is cheaper... etc etc...

You don't got to agree with me here, but an environmentalist says to conserve energy, but maybe if you cause more demand we can move into an era where we have energy surplus sooner.

Interesting. I never heard of SHRDLU before, but I have heard of Cyc wikipedia said came after. From what I've heard of CYC, CYC only takes words in relation to each other, but does not have a physics space in which to have "imagination space". Because of this, CYC doesn't sound like it should ever achieve AI.

However SHRDLU does sound promising. I would think if they enhanced the physics and vocabulary on SHRDLU, it could become "imagination space" for future AI. I knew this part could be created independently of "vision recognition" part, but I've felt that it'd be better if the vision recognition was done first. After all, if you're databasing objects on their real world dimensions, they'd work better in the physics imagination space because you have the exact dimensions and contours of the object. I mean, if you're gonna sit there and database in many different objects based on their geometry, might as well have it done automatically. Of course I wasn't thinking to start small with basic objects in a solid physics engine.

Interestingly enough: I think this is an area which advances could be made now. I wouldn't exactly start with SHRDLU because it is early 1970s technology. I'd shop around for good physics engines first. I have no money to buy physics engines, so I'd personally have to go with the best free one... So maybe I'm incapable of doing this research due to lack of funding. Anyway, someone else can do it: Find a good physics engine, then start databasing "Nouns" "Adjectives" "Verbs" and "Adverbs" maybe looking at initial SHRDLU code just for advice. The thing that makes me interested now is that I realize that many objects are not exactly the same objects: Trees are trees, but even the same variety of tree has different growth stages and limb orientations. So for generalization terms, it could be good to look at things like "Spheres" "Cubes" "Pyramids" and so on.

Thank you for putting me onto this. I think it is something that could be solved now with enough time and energy. The reason I put it off was because I made the assumption that the 3d digitizer could double as an "Object databaser" for inputting objects into the database. I originally didn't want to teach the AI about a world of objects that bare no relation to exact real world objects, but it is fine to have approximate objects and approximate physics to start with.

Easier might be the wrong word, maybe more cerebral. To do natural language interpretation, I would envision you start with a "dictionary database" full of objects. These objects would be nouns, and then you could program in properties on them known as adjectives. Without a "dictionary database" of known objects, I could not figure out how to code natural language. So you're right that natural language is more difficult than digitizing things because digitized things are a component of natural language. I just think if I have a database of digitized objects that writing a natural language on these things might be easier than the digitization in itself, but not noticeably easier.

So you start with nouns "dictionary objects", then you add adjectives by changing nouns properties. This is hugely time consuming, and the exercise is mostly done to figure out a best practice while you're doing it. But say you add all adjectives to some nouns. You then create an imagination space, and describe the nouns in action verbs Then you describe the verbs more adverbs. It is a huuuuuge undertaking, but the cool part is that you can work on subsets of the language with a small environment. Just start with a small room with a ball in it, and keep adding more nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. In the controlled environment, the Camera/Natural Language should understand everything that is there before you expose it out into the wide open real world.

If you want to check out my webpage on AI from 2002, you can do so here . There is a lot of information there that isn't as concise as I have here. AI is easy to understand conceptually when you think of it as simply a computer program taking in input from the outside world, and interacting with it. The AI I'm talking about has little to no machine learning involved. It is all hard coded AI for robots to take commands and follow them. It really isn't as hard as everyone thinks. I think the trap people fall into is,"I don't know how the brain works, so we can't figure out AI." or "AI is one of those things you need to write a program that programs itself", but if you just approach the problem of,"How do I make a robot go pick up a ball I threw?" you can see that is something that is codable with certain other understandable technologies.

We don't know how to digitize a world and put it into a 3d world yet. But you can see this is a problem that will be solved someday.
We don't know how to program a computer with Natural Language(English). But this is a problem that will be solved someday(especially if you have a database of 3d objects available through digitizing).

Artificial Intelligence isn't really as impossible as people think it is. I'd reason that it could be done with a company/government with money in just 7 years of the technology of digitizing things to a 3rd world. But due to inefficiencies in government/for profit companies, it probably won't happen for 20. And I have no idea how far off digitizing things in a 3rd world is off from now to add onto that.

I could go straight to working on Artificial Intelligence myself, and probably research a digitizer myself(no guarantees I could write it), but Artificial Intelligence research doesn't pay the bills.

If you have a 3d world, and can identify the objects in the world, then software can navigate its way around the world and do tasks.
I'd reason that wiring up Natural Language when having a large database of objects(nouns) would still be rather difficult, but not as difficult as changing camera feeds into 3d world representation.
Finally you need to build a body for the robot, so it can do things in the world. By understanding Natural Language, anyone can tell a robot what to do in their native tongue. Also translation is more effective because the AI can think about sentences and know which word you mean when the word has two meanings.

Sorry, every time I see these technologies that turn camera images into 3d worlds, I can't help but think about Artificial Intelligence. I'm a pretty good programmer, but that is just one piece of software I didn't want to develop myself. I kinda put off actually making Artificial Intelligence in 2002 until someone makes a nice piece of software that you can walk around buildings and turn them into Quake levels.

And in the process of waiting for this software, I theorized the biggest use of AI might be to teach people. Eventually I realized, you don't actually need AI to teach people with computer, all you need is digitize books, make some videos and do some other tutorial software. So if I ever get enough money to buy rights to books, or enough money to live off of, I'm going to try and see this vision through. You gotta realize 200$ for a laptop is cheaper than thousands of dollars of books, and software can take the place of a teacher, so education is gonna be cheap enough that even people in poor countries will have access to it. The only limiting factor is getting the rights to books, and writing some tutorial software. It is a high cost to do this, but once it is done, the benefits for society are several orders of magnitude greater.

If your hardrive is failing, software won't fix it. This could be as funny as creating a virus to say your computer's flux capacitor is overheating and you'll need to buy a replacement through exmechanicgoneonlinescammer.com

I remember in the early 2000s going,"If only someone could stream movies and television shows legally, they'd dominate." I told a couple people and a Comcast rep told me that they're rolling out,"On Demand" which as it turns out is moderately effective. I could never get the business model right to figure out how to legally stream movies without the movie makers going,"You can't stream out copies of our work at all." I even thought,"As long as I have one copy of their product per stream, that could be ok, right?" I never thought,"Open up a mail order delivery system, then transition into streaming later." That was the key to get to where they are now.

Your statement stands for observing, but here are some other thoughts on the two games:

Speaking as someone who played in a reasonably high level in both: Made the first Blizzard world championships in Brood War, and made 1000x my initial bankroll in Poker:

In Starcraft, you will only win tournaments if you're really good. In Poker, you don't need to be the best to win tournaments.

Because you need to be really good in Starcraft to win, there isn't much money for players who aren't top 1000 players.
Because anyone can win in Poker, sometimes you play perfectly and still lose.
If you're a top 10000, but not top 1000 player in Poker, you'll still make money just beating up on people worse than you. There is no such money to be had in Starcraft.

In Starcraft the ladder ranking system makes you a 50% player unless you're top 10 on the server, or you're at the bottom of the ladder. In Poker, it is pretty easy to find people worse than you and get over 50% rating when you're not top 10 in the world.

The funny part is that cheese is normally associated with people who have no skills to play a longer game. They just do the same build over and over, and manage to get like diamond or masters in ladder... But in actual tournament play, doing repetitive cheese just means you lose game 2 and 3.

Earth is destroyed, and everyone wants to cooperate in the space colonies, so it is a hyper democracy. Everyone is a politician and votes for things over the Internet. Also trials are held on the Internet with people voting if someone is guilty or not. If he is guilty, people are free to suggest a punishment on a forum, and the comment with the most votes gets to be the "criminal's" punishment. Let us just say,"Cruel and unusual punishment is basically the rule" Finally back to mob-justice, and with such a large mob too!

There could be an elaborate blocking/evasion/glancing blow system with a good ol 'kick' or 'sand toss' thrown in for good measure. The whole thing of lightsabre battling could be a great game play mechanic, and still do a ton of damage when it connects.

I still remember the day when Microsoft updated one of their Windows versions(I think Win98?) and Netscape would not run because they removed a.dll.
Also Embrace, Extend, Extinguish was put on cool down for 10 years. That stuff got really old. Why try to make something useful when Microsoft would just catch wind of it and redo it?

I have no problem with OS bundling though. I bet people have some nice bundles of software ready with Linux. Once multiplatform aps become the rule instead of exception, people won't have a real reason to stick with M$ unless M$ really invests in new technologies. I'd like them to take what they got with Kinect and apply it for all known objects in the world, maybe be the people who solve robotic vision, and let us have robots that can interact in the world safely.